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General Plumbing History

Plumbing has a great and ancient heritage.  It can trace its history back to the very early days of each of the great civilizations.  In fact, these early civilizations would most likely never have developed without the help of their plumbers.

The ancient Egyptians were not only master builders (see their pyramids and temples) - they were also master plumbers. Those same great pyramids contain elaborate bathrooms for the dead to use on their transcendent journey from one life to another life. These great craftsmen knew how to coppersmith - which is still in use today.

The great rival civilization from the same period was Babylonia.  Here the plumbers participated in developing one of the great wonders of the world - the "Hanging Gardens of Babylon". 

A much smaller civilization was developing about the same time on the island of Crete in the Mediterranean Sea.  In the palace of King Minos was found the world's earliest "flushing" toilet.  Unfortunately, this civilization was devastated and lost for centuries by a cataclysmic earthquake.

It was the ancient Romans who had the greatest impact on the development of plumbing and everything associated with it.  In fact, the word "plumber" comes from the Latin word for lead - "plumbus" - which was used extensively as a material for plumbing.  Romans built great sewers (one of which, the Cloaca Maxima, is still in use today) and stupendous aquaducts which brought water from the mountains into the heart of Rome.  They loved their public baths, with their heated water and warm air, and the largest of them was able to seat over 3,000 people.  Much of this plumbing was preserved in the lava-covered cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum.

Most of the knowledge about water and sewerage was lost with the fall of the Roman Empire, and the following centuries saw frequent outbreaks of epidemics such as the Black Plague which at their peak killed as many as a third of the people of Europe.

It was only in the 19th century that people came to understand the importance of clean water and proper sanitation.  This was partly the result of advances in medical science.  But it was also partly due to the epidemics (such as cholera) that spread throughout the world and killed so many.  At last the profession of plumbing was once again to receive the recognition that it was due.

The Roman Empire was the most dominant society the world had ever seen until modern times. Cecil B. De Mille movies have made us conscious of their ruthless military prowess, but the Romans also excelled like nobody before in technology and social organization. And for all the blood they shed, ancient Rome was generous in spreading its civilized ways among the peoples it conquered. Their exported plumbing systems probably saved more lives than the Roman legions slaughtered. The fabled Roman baths helped spread a culture of cleanliness throughout their empire, at least until near the end when those former community recreation centers degenerated into brothels.

The Dark Ages

Rot from within combined with barbarian hordes from the East put an end to Rome's achievements. This time, there were no worthy successors to carry on civilization's legacy. The warriors who laid waste to Rome were nomads and plunderers who had no appreciation for clean running water and sanitary waste disposal. The aptly named Dark Ages ensued, leading to 1,000 years of unrelenting ignorance, disease and squalor.

What tiny remnants of civilization remained were harbored mainly in monasteries, as Christianity took hold throughout the Western world. Some of the medieval monks enjoyed a semblance of sanitation, with privies set atop streams that would naturally convey away their waste even as the incoming water provided for their drinking and cooking needs. But for the most part, their lives were only a little better than the miserable lot of the common man, who faced long odds against acquiring gray hair. The early Christians rejected all aspects of Roman culture-an understandable impulse in light of their ghastly fate as so many lion lunches. The debauchery associated with Roman baths in the latter stages of the Empire helped propel them toward the view that life's purpose was to purify the soul rather than the body. Early Christian tracts were filled with admonishment against physical comfort. One fourth-century pilgrim to Jerusalem was recorded as bragging that she had not washed her face in 18 years so as not to disturb the holy water that had been splashed upon it at baptism.

These attitudes prevailed throughout the millennium lasting from about the fifth through 15th centuries. As Western civilization stagnated, so did plumbing. Even kings and queens routinely died from typhoid and dysentery. Moats were open cesspools that served well to deter enemies, but imagine living in one of those castles on a hot summer day.

Slow Recovery

Gutenberg's printing press enabled knowledge to spread beyond monastery walls, leading to the Renaissance, which gave Western civilization something to be proud of once again. But the intense blossoming of the arts in the 15th and 16th centuries was not matched by progress in plumbing.

The earliest known flushing toilet of modern times has been attributed to Sir John Harington, a godson of Queen Elizabeth I who is said to have put the device in one of her castles as well as his own home around 1595. It was a crude contraption that inspired jokes and which the Queen reportedly declined to use. He never made another one. (No, Thomas Crapper did not invent the toilet. He was a successful artisan who lived in the late 19th century and practiced plumbing among other crafts, but most of what you've heard about him is myth.) The earliest patent for a flush toilet belonged to another Englishman, Alexander Cumming, in 1775. Improvements were made on these devices over the years, but for the next century they remained Rube Goldberg contraptions that didn't work very well and tended to reek from all the waste matter collected in their ill-fitting joints. The Industrial Revolution, triggered by James Watt's harnessing of steam power in the mid-18th century, led to frightful conditions in European and American cities. Waves of peasants, seeking work in the burgeoning factories, crowded together in decrepit tenements without running water or sewage disposal. The rivers upon which most major cities were built became overwhelmed by the volume of waste dumped into them. England's Parliament shut down for a while in 1859 because of the stench from the nearby Thames River. A New York City newspaper in the 1830s had a daily front-page report of neighborhood cholera outbreaks. Virtually every U.S. and European city suffered hideous casualty tolls from waterborne diseases.

By the middle of the 19th century, fancier homes and buildings began to acquire indoor plumbing, but most owners were sorry they did. Toilets were tied to unvented and often poorly sloped drainage systems. Early plumbers were basically metal workers with strong arms who made their own pipe by hand, but they knew nothing of hydraulics or sanitation. The U.S. Census Bureau categorized plumbers and gas fitters in a single category until the 1880s.

The "Heyday" of Plumbing

Then something profound happened that led, in the 1880s and 1890s, to a flourishing of the plumbing industry into the grand enterprise it is today.

Throughout the last decade and a half, a steady stream of press releases have crossed my desk celebrating the 100th anniversary of industry companies and trade groups. The PHCC organization began as the National Association of Master Plumbers in 1883. The forerunner of the Mechanical Contractors Association of America formed in 1889, as did the United Association plumbers union. ASSE traces its origin to around the turn of the century. Numerous plumbing manufacturers started up in the 1880s and 1890s, quite a few of which are still in business. What set off this explosion? I think more than anything else it was the discovery and promulgation of correct venting procedures. Venting had been known for decades, but primitive plumbers tended to do it on a hit-and-miss, trial-and-error basis. There was no systematic guide as to sizing and placement of vents. Correct venting and drainage procedures did not become widespread knowledge until the 1870s. Particularly important was the 1876 publication of George Waring's landmark book, The Sanitary Drainage of Houses and Towns, along with various other books and articles explaining how to correctly design plumbing systems that worked the way they were supposed to. And thus began the good life as we know it today. Famed physician-writer, the late Dr. Lewis Thomas, former Chancellor of the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, wrote in 1984: "There is no question that our health has improved spectacularly in the past century...One thing seems certain: It did not happen because of medicine, or medical science or even the presence of doctors.

"Much of the credit should go to the plumbers and engineers of the Western world. The contamination of drinking water by human feces was at one time the single greatest cause of human disease and death for us; it remains so, along with starvation and malaria, for the Third World. Typhoid fever, cholera and dysentery were the chief threats to survival in the early years of the 19th century in New York City, and when the plumbers and sanitary engineers had done their work in the construction of our cities these diseases began to vanish."